At the end of the day, your friendly Autoblog editors are car guys, just like you. So, while we might have more of an opportunity to test some of the most interesting vehicles on the new car scene than does your average gear head, we can still be found whiling away those long afternoon hours looking at used cars and thinking about what could be.

Just the other day, we had a vivid reminder about one of our dream cars from the very recent past, the 2011 BMW 1 Series M Coupe. If you didn't catch it, Michael Harley had a great time testing and reviewing the new Dinan S3-R version of the car, which throws an impressively engineered turbo and suspension tune on a BMW that was damn near perfect out of the box.

In the Comments section of that review, a few savvy Autoblog readers pointed out that our estimated price for a used donor car, set at $50,000, was low. Odd, we thought, as the car retailed for less than $50k ($46,135) when it was new in 2011. So we started checking around.

With only 740 units sold in the US to begin with, finding data on 1MC sales is a bit dicey, but here's what we know. We tracked down about 20 cars currently on sale, by way of major used auto sales websites, and found an average asking price of a whopping $61,670 with an average mileage of about 11,600 on the clock. That's more than $15,500 over the MSRP when new, or an appreciation of around $5k per year.

The best deal we could locate was a 14k-miler for $55,500; the most expensive being $65,991 with just 8,800 miles. Those numbers are just about right on based on the industry standard Black Book, too, which calls the retail value in California, for instance, at an even $60,000 for an "Extra Clean" car. Talk about an investment we can get behind...2011 BMW 1 Series M Coupe now more expensive than when new originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 06 Apr 2014 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.